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An anonymous reader writes "It's frustrating when you explore the web and encounter the famous message: 404 Error – Page Not Found. What could make it a little better is a customized 404 message. Here are some really good ones that should inspire other web designers."

Why do I get the sneaking sense that taking web-design guidance from a site at "flashuser.net" that managed to get its DB hosed while attempting to serve up a slab of largely static content is probably not the best of ideas?

Years ago 404 errors were not that uncommon when people were looking for something based on a poorly written link or whatever else. At that time, it was cute to have a custom 404 error for the misdirected.

However, by my experience with my home web server at least, >>99% of 404 errors are the result of script kiddies trying to find vulnerabilities in my web site (usually looking for phpmyadmin or similar). They won't read the 404 error anyways, so whether it is cute, vulgar, or plain, it doesn't matter because their automatic system that is trolling for vulnerabilities will discard the error message anyways.

Oh, I know. I ran a site on Wordpress for a little over a year (fan site for a video game). My top traffic in a day was 20,000 unique visitors and 150k page views. During that peak day I was getting 6-7 hits a second, and without caching I would have been dead in the water.

Having a simple theme that could apply across an entire site is amazingly nice. I really like CMSes and will use them again for future endeavors. But not understanding the tools (wordpress) you use when hosting a site yourself is just asking for trouble.